Mumbai

I have just been reading the news reports from Mumbai in India. Every time a life is taken is one time too many and this is many, many times too many. It does not seem clear who or why. But the why is never enough to justify this sort of indiscriminate action.

There is no understanding this. There is no understanding why people fall into this level of anger and hatred. Perhaps it is sickness, perhaps it is evil - although this is unfashionable - to posit evil as an excuse for anything. But there is something, sometimes, which seems to define all sensibility and all rationality.

I can understand anger - after all I have felt like hitting people who have annoyed me, I have felt like shouting at the really irritating people around me and sometimes have! But the difference between that and actually doing something to really hurt a person is different and then further, to randomly hurt a person you do not really know........

But perhaps that is easier if you add a little dash of evil into the equation. After all if you do not know someone it is easier to see them as less real, as other, as somehow not so important. Perhaps less human. Then it is easy to slide into a position where they do not matter, where their life is simply a thing of no value - this is even more apparent when you feel that your own life is of no value or that the value of your life is far outweighed by the value of a cause.

My heart goes out to the people of Mumbai. I know, even as an observer, when London has been under much more minor attack during my lifetime how unsettling and infuriating that is. I am ashamed that there is mention that the attackers may be citizens of my country - such is my sense of identity.

What can I do? Let everyone who I meet know that they are worth something and that they are important. Work to fight the systems which leave some people in abject poverty and others with far, far too much. Spend little time judging and much time praying for understanding and compassion for all involved. This might sound like an easy out but I am not a lawyer, I am a priest, my job is not to judicially review. Justice is in the future, compassion is now.